IronWatcher’s review published on Letterboxd:
Watched in the cinema
I was just in 2nd grade when the Pokémon hype conquered Germany. Together with my classmates and friends I inhaled the TV series and also the Gameboy game (Red Edition) I gambled a lot. But I was never the one who collected the trading cards. Nevertheless, I knew all 151 names of the first generation by heart. I even went into the first three anime movies together with my dad (whom I'm still very grateful to for this seemingly endless ordeal it must have been for him).
With the years and the introduction of hundreds of new Pokémon, my interest in the brand faded away. I still followed the development, but rather distantly. Somehow it all became too much for me. I know there are Detective Pikachu video games, but I have no idea how complex they are. If I've done the right research, there are currently 809 different Pokémon and that's just insane!
So I was all the happier that of those 809 only 53 Pokémon appeared in the movie, 29 of which were from the first generation.
So the feared overload of characters gave way to pure nostalgia and a cuteness overload.
I especially liked how organically the world that is presented to you is designed. Since Roger Rabbit I've rarely seen such a convincing interaction between animated cartoon characters (in this case animated characters) and real people, whereby the individual Pokémon are animated with a lot of attention to detail. The plush fur of Pikachu, the scaly skin of Glurak (Charizard) or the smooth face of Pantimos (Mr. Mime) look fantastic. The city that is visibly London also looks lively and credible.
The concept or synopsis of the film is really strange. A Film Noir setting, which justifies the comparisons to Roger Rabbit, meets the voice of Ryan Reynolds, who speaks Detective Pikachu as a kind of throttled Deadpool, including child-friendly saccasm, and dives into an action-packed detective story with the Jurassic World 2 technerd.
Well, the film doesn't really offer much narration. Of course, you shouldn't expect "The Third Man", but a more complex detective story would have been really nice. Even Zootopia had more suspense. So the focus is more on humour and nostalgia, which is absolutely fine because the movie is really well done in terms of look and entertainment. And Pikachu is so damn cute!!! And it made me feel 8 years old again for about 2 hours. Not every movie does that!
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